


Emeritus

by reylomancy



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: E for Eventual Smut, F/M, academic enemies Ben and Luke, red tape of university bureaucracy, that one very specific fic you write where you just vent about your job, the Institute is the Resistance ish, the finance office and business school are the dark side ish, work enemies
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-28
Updated: 2019-08-29
Packaged: 2020-09-28 16:18:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20428838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reylomancy/pseuds/reylomancy
Summary: Dr. Luke Skywalker, renowned archaeologist of the ancient Jedi religion and head of the once-prestigious Ahch-To Institute for Human Studies, applies for emeritus status and peaces the fuck out the minute recent-grad Rey Johnson comes onboard.It’s up to Rey to keep the program running while combating enemies that emerge across the University administration, enemies who are looking to end the Institute and get their hands on Luke's funding.





	1. Things We Say Now

**Author's Note:**

> If you're one of the like 10 people who follow my [Reylo twitter](https://twitter.com/reylomancy) that I don't use except that one time I tried to start this fic as an epistolary tweet fic, hi, hello, yes I am a mess.

“Luke Skywalker, you abominable arse, if you ever come back from your bloody sabbatical, I will beat _you_ bloody,” Rey hissed.

It was 8:52 on a Tuesday morning. She had a new jam stain on her cardigan, a third cup of tea on her cluttered desk, and 27 emails left to respond to. Despite the caffeine from the tea, she sat slumped in her chair, one hand clutching her forehead against the rapidly approaching onset of a cluster headache, the other furiously negotiating her keyboard and mouse.

“What was that?” an unreasonably chipper Rose Tico popped her head in Rey’s open doorway. She had both hands clutched around one of her programmer-themed mugs (“Weeks of coding can save you hours of planning”), newly filled with breakroom coffee. Rey just groaned back, which Rose took as her cue to come in. She plopped herself down in the free semi-broken wheelie chair beside Rey, which instantly sank a good six inches with a tired wheeze.

“Are you whispering threats to the computer again? I told you, if you just let me update Java it’ll fix that OpenRefine bug.”

Rey sighed, wheeling away from her desk so she didn’t have to keep staring at the screen. “No, it’s not Java. It’s Luke. I’m discovering yet more bullshit of his that was left undone.”

Rose arched an eyebrow and blew on her coffee. “What is it this time?”

“He never completed effort certification for this half cycle, obviously, but not for last half either. Now we’re behind and _I’m_ the one getting nasty emails from the sponsored projects office,” Rey huffed. “The man had two employees on his grant. _Two_. How hard is that to check off on once every six months?”

Rose raised a hand up in the air. “You mean, 'how hard is that to ask Rose or Poe or _literally anyone else_ to do for you every six months?'”

Rey cracked a smile. She wasn’t sure if the knowledge that Luke had jerked everyone around like this made her feel better or worse. But it did at least make his sudden abandonment feel a little less personal. “Seriously though. What kind of person hires a new program coordinator while on sabbatical, promises to be around to work with them and answer questions, then sends in their retirement paperwork and turns into a ghost?”

Rose lifted her eyebrows into an incredulous expression. “Um, a 75-year-old white man from a powerful family with a PhD in Classics, and more funding than some of the neuroscience labs?” she snorted.

The office phone on Rey's desk gave a sudden shrill, no-nonsense bleat, and Rey rolled her eyes. "I don't know how you stood working for such a selfish, entitled arse for so long, Rose. Honestly." Rey dug the heel of her palm into her forehead and fiddled with a button on the side of the phone. It stopped ringing.

Rose smirked. "It can do okay things for your self esteem to watch a man who held a celebrated humanities chair for thirty years and shook hands with three Presidents spend half an hour looking for his deleted emails in his Mac trash."

"Amazing," Rey shook her head.

"He called me a genius once for installing a bookmark bar for him. Aren't you going to get that?" The phone was chiming insistently again.

Rey squinted at the caller ID and grimaced. “Ugh, that’ll be D’acy from the anthro department asking for the hundredth time if I know whether Luke still wants to be Director. Or the Library asking for the 78 books Luke has had continuously checked out for the last 9 years. Or maybe it’s HR finally letting me know I’m allowed to rehire Jannah after Luke forgot to sign her reappointment paperwork for the summer.”

Rose peered cautiously over the rim of her mug, brown eyes wide. “I take it you still haven’t heard from him?”

Rey watched the phone for a second, but it didn’t ring again. Satisfied whoever it was had hung up, she huffed and turned back to Rose. “Rose, I’m pretty sure you’re the only one he still bothers to email every once in a while.”

“Oh, I’m almost positive that’s because he doesn’t have his Netflix password saved and he knows I know it.”

* * *

> _Dear Dr. Skywalker, _
> 
> _My name is Rey Johnson, and I’m excited to apply for the opening for a program coordinator at the Ahch-To Institute. I understand you will soon return from a long sabbatical and are looking for someone to help coordinate your publication and research teams. While I do not have a graduate degree in anthropology, I more than make up for my lack of academic credentials with a quickness and willingness to learn, and a strong sense of determination. _
> 
> _I put myself through college while working full time, graduating from the University of Coruscant with a dual degree in archaeology and anthropology in 2017. I was fortunate enough to join Dr. Lorsan Tekka on his 2013 season at Jakku, where I gained a familiarity with GIS and practical field methods. I was also a research assistant in Dr. Enfys Nest’s comparative osteopathy lab, and a part-time assistant in the Classics library. I have been equally fortunate to have spent the last six years working at a local garage as both a self-taught bookkeeper and mechanic. My time at the garage has helped me to become a creative problem solver, a confident multitasker, and an excellent office administrator. _
> 
> _I’m ready to turn my strong sense of curiosity back toward the fields of anthropology and archaeology. My familiarity with the disciplines, together with my ability to run an office smoothly make me a great candidate for this position with ATI. As an undergraduate, I read and greatly admired your published survey of Jedha and the sanctuary at Reytha. I would be grateful for the opportunity to aid ATI in further excellent studies on the ancient Jedi religion. _
> 
> _Thank you for your time, and I hope to work with you soon. _
> 
> _Rey Johnson _

✧

Six months ago, Rey had driven the people in her life halfway up the damned wall when she’d learned there was an opening at the Ahch-To Institute for Human Studies. Finn, bless him, had helped her go over three different incarnations of her resume with a fine-toothed comb. Friends throughout undergrad (ever since a housing admin had marked "Ray" as a boy and put her in a room with Finn), they both had somewhat unconventional backgrounds that struggled to come across as competitive in a pool full of other applicants who had had advantages like prep school, parent-paid tuition, and, well, knowing who their families actually were. Finn had been a marketing major in the business school though, and he was a natural at spinning himself to sound like “a big deal” to any recruiter he met. Rey hoped he could rub some of that magic off onto her much-overlooked liberal arts BAs.

As for Han, it had taken Rey a long time to work up the nerve to tell him she was looking to submit her information anywhere that wasn’t the garage, but once she had, he’d been surprisingly helpful. His information had been proudly printed at the top of her references list, and he’d even suffered through Rey’s simplified explanation of Google Docs so he could help her with her cover letter. She had wondered why he’d snorted and chuckled when he saw that the letter was dressed to Dr. Luke Skywalker, why Chewy had grumbled something in Ukrainian from underneath a motorbike he was fixing at the nearest station, but Han had just shaken his head and told her it was nothing.

Rey had wondered for a brief moment whether Han knew Dr. Skywalker, but immediately dismissed the idea as preposterous. Han had bought the garage almost 30 years ago, as soon as he’d saved up the money from truck driving, and he hadn’t done anything else since. Rey knew he’d gotten into plenty of adventures and plenty more trouble when he was a younger man, but she was fairly certain none of it had involved archaeology_—_the man wasn’t exactly Indiana Jones.

His ex-wife, Dr. Leia Organa, had been a department chair in the College of Liberal Arts, but she had been a professor of criminal justice, not classics. Rey knew their son had been a student in the college at some point as well, but Han had been estranged from him since before he’d even graduated from U Coruscant some 8 or 9 years ago. Rey doubted Han would have known the names of every professor he’d had. Rey had tried to make up for this absentee son by making sure to fill her days at the garage with chatter about what she was learning in her classes. And Han and Chewy, along with Finn and Maz, the ancient head archivist at the library where Rey had worked, had all attended her graduation. There was even a framed picture of the five of them, which hung on a wall in the garage outside Han’s office.

✧

It was days like today, when she was swamped with Luke’s nonsense and all too aware of the fact that she no longer had any kind of mentor around to offer her support or guidance, that Rey regretted telling Han she was looking for another job. She regretted hugging Maz goodbye at the library, and halting her Ukrainian lessons with Chewy, and agreeing to break her lease with Finn on their two-bedroom apartment near campus so he could relocate closer to his marketing job downtown and she could move closer to the research campus. There was nothing wrong with the coworkers in her new office who bothered to show up. Part-time data archivist, part-time grad student, full-time angel Rose Tico was an amazing work buddy, and graphic designer slash anthro consultant Poe Dameron was cool to talk to whenever she'd managed to get him to pull his Air Pods out of his ears. But Rey couldn't help but often feel very alone in things here at the Institute.

It was on days like today that she’d go back and read through her cover letter, gritting her teeth at the optimism she’d felt, the way she’d tried so hard to sell herself as a good candidate to work with the great Dr. Luke Skywalker, only to get his two short replies a week later:

> _Tomorrow—bring your paperwork to SWB 4.100, Rose will help you with HR. _

And in response to her profuse thank-you email:

> _Sure. See you around kid _

On days like today, she'd refresh her email client for the hundredth time, still holding out the smallest hope that an unread email would appear from Luke Skywalker in response to the hundreds she'd sent and forwarded and copied him on over the last six months.

But today, like any other day, she was disappointed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guys. _Guys._ I voluntarily wrote a **cover letter** for this fic. What will I not suffer through for this ship? 😭
> 
> So… this is that fanfic that’s just me funneling my very specific work ranting into Reylo. I have spent the last several years working very closely with an old Classics professor, and _I have some stories to get out_. I love my director dearly, but good lord, if you have never known the specific torture of working with entitled, tech-illiterate old men, count your blessings.
> 
> Anyway, I hope this is entertaining to more than just people who know what it’s like to work at a university! And TBH, there’s not _that much_ admin drama at my school, so I’ll probably be taking some liberties with this fic in later chapters.
> 
> I’ve got a very bare-bones outline of 20ish chapters planned out for this. I’m generally a super slow writer, but since this is like 50% work rant, 50% Reylo, I’m hoping I’ll stay motivated! Also feel free to come yell at me on [main](https://twitter.com/emdashrights).


	2. The Snap

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We meet overly intense finance officer Kylo Ren.

For the first Monday morning in awhile, Rey actually felt energized as she sat at her desk, legs crossed and sipping tea as she checked her email. There was something more refreshing than her PG Tips currently going down in the Dean’s office, and she’d been watching the drama play out on the senior staff listserv since nearly 7 AM.

> _ Dear Colleagues: _
> 
> _ I’m writing to inform you that DJ Toro is being replaced as the Executive Financial Officer of the College, effective immediately. _
> 
> _ Please join me in welcoming his replacement from the School of Business, Kylo Ren. Mr. Ren was a financial analyst at the business school for five years, and spent another three as the Assistant Financial Officer. He received his MBA from the University program. _
> 
> _ We are excited to have Mr. Ren’s help in the Dean’s office, and hope he will aid us in a smooth transition into the new fiscal year, which, as you all know, begins next month. Please make sure to update your office routing and contact information to reflect this staffing change, and check your email for further details as they arise. _
> 
> _ Thank you as always for your patience and cooperation, _
> 
> _ Sincerest regards, _
> 
> _ Amilyn Holdo, Dean _
> 
> _ College of Liberal Arts _

DJ had been rather notorious among the senior staff for being unreliable, unsavory, and just all around too sketchy to be the finance executive for a college. The senior staff listserv was currently blowing up with wild speculation, gossip, frustration, and salt. Rey knew Rose would be thirsty for more details once she came in and heard the news, and would probably jump on the “fired for corruption” bandwagon. She had complained to Rey about dealing with DJ once before, and Rey was happy the jerk finally appeared to be getting some comeuppance.

There was such a strong response to DJ leaving that hardly anyone was talking about his replacement, Kylo Ren. The odd name had Rey curiously Googling him in search of a staff picture, but nothing emerged. She quickly gave up the search in favor of moving on to the rest of her overflowing inbox. It wasn’t exactly a good use of her time, especially considering her small unit would only have an excuse to route documents to him perhaps a few times a year. His strong background in financial wizardry reassured her though, as it probably did a lot of others in the perpetually cash-strapped liberal arts college.

At any rate, if even a quarter of the stories being shared on the listserv about dealing with DJ were true, Rey had no doubt Kylo Ren would be an absolute dream in comparison.

* * *

The phone in Kylo’s pants gave a protracted series of buzzes, signaling he was getting a call. He didn’t even bother fishing the device from his pocket—he knew it was from his mother.

She’d been trying to call him all day, ever since Dean Holdo had sent out an email to the entire college announcing that he would be taking over for some corrupt disaster of a former employee who'd actually gone by "DJ." Kylo had glanced at the voice-to-text readout for her first voicemail, and once he’d surmised she wanted him over for dinner to celebrate his “happy return” now that he’d “seen the light,” he was determined to ignore the rest of her calls.

He’d been so deeply estranged from his father for the last decade or so that he couldn’t even remember the last time they’d spoken. (Well actually he did, it was the shouting match they'd gotten into when Han and Leia first found out he’d dropped out of his graduate program to go for an MBA instead, but admitting he remembered would belie the careful air of indifference and detached disdain he'd been cultivating for the better part of the 2010s.) Leia was harder to avoid though. She’d been a professor since he was an undergrad, and he was aware that she’d been a department chair in humanities for about 7 years now. They may have worked in different schools, but the campus was only so big, and run-ins happened. He never regretted his decision to change his name from Ben Organa-Solo when he made his move to the business school though. It meant no one had ever thought to ask if they were related, and it made Leia that much easier to ignore on campus. 

Snoke had known, of course, and Holdo obviously knew, though she was also wise enough to play it cool that she was an old friend of his mother’s and had probably met him while he was still in diapers (an even more disturbing prospect if his mother was to be believed about his supposed propensity for escaping said diapers and toddling around stark naked).

His phone buzzed one more time while he and his assistant, Mitaka, took the elevator up to Kylo’s new office (he couldn’t say he was surprised his mother of all people would manage to force her signal through even in an elevator). He swatted angrily at his pants but overall successfully fought the urge to smash his phone onto the dingily carpeted elevator floor. Mitaka gave an audible swallow beneath the several boxes of Kylo’s possessions that he had carried all the way from the business admin building across campus, but said nothing.

The ugly, decades-old carpet continued from the elevator and into the third-floor corridor which led into the offices for the Dean’s staff. The flooring creaked loudly beneath Kylo’s feet as he and Mitaka stepped off of the elevator, and Kylo wondered whether someone in the college had actually been stupid enough to cover hardwood floors with mildewed shag, or if his attempts at reining in his usual stomping gait were just not quite successful today. 

A very friendly assistant named Kaydel Connix had already given him his key, but he hadn’t seen the space yet. The liberal arts administrative building was in a lovely area of campus, at the very core where all of the oldest schools had first been built, and was surrounded by shady malls and charming landscaping features. The building itself was probably historic, but a chronic lack of humanities funding had kept the inside from measuring up to the brochure-photo-ready exterior.

Sure enough, as Kylo flicked on the light switch in his new office, he confirmed it to be a far cry from his old office in the business section of campus, where all of the buildings were state-of-the-art and glossy with professional chrome and glass finishes. Mitaka scuttled in quickly after him and muffled a quiet groan as he set the boxes down on Kylo’s new bulky wooden desk.

“It’s, um, nice,” Mitaka mumbled, blotting at the beads of sweat on his forehead with the cuff of his gray suit jacket. Even at the height of summer, the faculty and staff (and even some of the students) at the school of business went business formal. Kylo had already noticed that the liberal arts school was much more casual, and had fixed Mitaka with a meaningful glare when he caught the man glancing hopefully at the fuzzy cardigan/graphic tee combo Kaydel had been sporting (don’t even get Kylo started on her hairstyle—two knobby blonde buns on either side of her head—which looked like something Kylo had probably seen on a four-year-old girl at some point in his life). No, the most casual thing they’d be seeing him in was a blazer.

“You can go to your own office now, Mikata.” Kylo made to sit in the executive leather desk chair, then grimaced at the flattened cushions. He’d have to have Mitaka carry over his old chair from the business building after hours, before some voracious admin associate could lay claim to it or put it in inventory.

“Er, I don’t have an office, sir. They’ve given me a cubicle out on the floor where we met Miss Connix,” Mitaka said in that way of his where he seemed to think he was being helpful by supplying Kylo with unnecessary details. But Kylo was already dialing into his voicemail client to delete all of the new messages from his mother now cluttering his inbox, and was not paying any attention.

Once the tedious chore was taken care of (tedious because his large fingers had a hard time pressing the proper button to delete the messages), he logged into his new desktop (perhaps he could also have Mitaka pilfer his 2019 model Mac from his old office while he was at it) and got to work.

Even over at the far-flung business school, he’d heard the legends of the gloriously inept liberal arts finance department, and everything DJ Toro had left in his destructive wake only appeared to further reflect that image. If Kylo hadn’t already been sure he was good enough to run the finance office over at the business school, he might have balked at the prospect of whipping liberal arts’ accounts into shape within the next three weeks.

But he was Kylo Ren. This college had tried to chew him up and spit him out once before, and it had failed.

He huffed in frustration as the old PC lagged in opening the financial mainframe program, and resisted the urge to snap one of the slats running along the dated wooden blinds draped across his one small window. This foray into the humanities school would be brief, he told himself, and exactly the right stepping stone to position him for greater things. He knew Snoke would only allow him to climb so far in the business school, would have kept him leashed beneath him, and always just below the level of esteem Kylo craved for himself.

No, there was something right in coming here. It wasn’t “seeing the light,” or whatever nonsense return-of-the-prodigal-son scenario his mother imagined was finally playing out. Once, he’d been just as humiliated and frustrated here as he’d felt in his years under Snoke. But he had been a much younger man then, and Snoke had made him stronger. Kylo was ready to take control now, to show everyone who had ever disrespected him how he might hold their fate in his hands if it suited him. 

He was ready to gain the respect he deserved, and perhaps also the revenge.

* * *

Rey had been right in her assumption that things would be very different under Kylo Ren. Within the same day of Dean Holdo’s email, he’d sent out his own introduction, as well as an invitation to a meeting at the administrative building for all the financial unit heads. This technically included Rey, but ATI’s budget wasn’t very complicated, and Rose had assured her these meetings didn’t generally contain information they were concerned about.

ATI was a little unorthodox, just like Luke had been—or so Rose claimed. They had no active faculty, and even before Luke earned emeritus status he hadn’t really taught for years. No grad students or TAs to worry about paying tuition or work study for. No real business contracts, because apparently every researcher they worked with had convinced Luke to bend rules and pay them with wire transfers. They didn’t pay full overhead on their grants because Luke knew the Vice President of Research, and they even got supplemental research funding from the college thanks to an old friendship with Dean Holdo. The accounts were somehow simple enough that Rose had been managing them part-time before Rey was hired.

Rey might have thought to look a little deeper into these arrangements and make sure everything was on the up and up, but to be honest, she’d been swamped from her first day at ATI and not in any position to go digging like that. She had known a lot would go into being the coordinator of an entire institute, but she hadn’t realized ATI was also an understaffed one to begin with. 

She was responsible for all the administrative stuff—payroll, hiring, HR, budgets, financials, etc. But since they had grants and researchers, that also meant coordinating relationships with scholars, some of them across the world, as well as making sure funding requirements and paperwork were being handled. The Institute was working on publishing the next volume of their research, and the only support she had on that front at the moment was Poe Dameron, who was doing the graphic design and writing a few of the chapters. The series editor had quit before Rey started, so she also found herself formatting and revising drafts and negotiating a publishing contract by herself. 

Rose was a great resource if Rey had a question about something she’d been forced to help Luke work out before Rey had come into the picture, but Rose was also only working for ATI part-time while she earned her graduate degree in information science. Rose had been hired a year ago to help ATI with a massive digital archival project, but getting stuck more-or-less managing the office for Luke had seriously slowed down her progress. If anything, Rey found herself trying to pitch in some of her own time, often helping Rose with some of the less technical data cleanup efforts, or occasionally meeting up with Maz to get the archivist’s opinion on their project.

Essentially, Rey was perpetually swamped, and well aware that it was primarily because there just weren't enough people around to provide support.

So it felt good to suddenly have a more present leader like Kylo Ren among the Dean's office. Some people had already been complaining about him being domineering and hard to work with, but then people always thought poorly of the people who had the unfortunate task of balancing the budget. Others hated how often he emailed about deadlines and meetings and procedural updates. But having him around made Rey worry less about whether or not she was missing something when it came to running ATI's finances. She'd come to learn that she'd much rather handle a stuffed inbox than be surprised down the road with something no one had bothered to tell her sooner.

✧

It was currently 4 PM on a Wednesday. 

Rose had been in such a good mood last week when the news of DJ’s sacking broke (everyone on the listserv agreed it was a sacking, anyway), that she’d brought in boxes of doughnuts from the campus café. Rey may or may not have had two chocolate glazed sitting on her desk and the remains of a bear claw in her hand (“they’ll get stale if they sit too long” she rationalized to herself). She was feeling particularly proud of herself for figuring out how to use a script to rename large batches of archival files, and her inbox was as moderately clear as it got. Rey was just thinking about how nice it would be to leave a little before 5 so she could go grocery shopping without worrying about hitting the after-work crowd in all its glory, when her computer made a quick series of angry beeps, one on top of the other.

She groaned to herself, and briefly considered pretending she hadn’t seen the emails and going on with her grocery-buying plans anyway, but duty and curiosity got the better of her.

She had five emails from contributors to the upcoming research volume, some of them sent one on top of the other. Three were from Dr. Gial Ackbar, a palynologist, and two were from Tallie Lintra, a post-doc specializing in geometric-style transport ceramics.

"It's about damn time," Rey muttered to herself as she hovered her mouse over Dr. Ackbar's various emails to preview the contents. He'd been working on a study of materials found in an anaerobic environment at the bottom of a very unique ritual cave deposit on Ahch-To, and it was two months overdue. She checked the second message, which was a massive photo collection of finds photographed through a microscope. The third was an invoice for $5,000. Tallie's emails also included a contribution to the publication and an invoice, though hers were at least on time. 

Kylo Ren had been sending out very helpful batches of reminders about the end of the year financial deadlines lately, some of which Rey hadn't known about thanks to her lack of experience and DJ's general ineptitude. The deadlines for final payments on contracted work had been especially helpful, offering Rey a great opportunity to wrangle all her delinquent researchers in one go. She’d been trying to get her hands on some of these materials for a full six months, and in the end all she’d apparently had to do was threaten people with not getting paid. Everyone had fallen in line within a week. Tallie and Dr. Ackbar's studies made the final two. Rey thought it was a shame the research campus wasn’t connected to the main campus, or else she might have brought Kylo Ren a thank-you doughnut or two.

Rey cheerfully polished off her second doughnut as she pulled up the tracker she'd started to help keep her tasks for the publication straight. She thought about how she might take the leftovers home with her, maybe eat them with a glass of milk once she'd gone to the store, while she checked off Ackbar and Tallie's names and added their invoice amounts to her financial spreadsheet.

Ten contributors at $5,000 each came out to $50,000 in the end. Luckily, there was just enough money left in the budget for this year to cover it; every other penny in that account was safely encumbered away for the subvention she was going to have to pay the press to publish their book in December, which was another $50,000.

If Rey had known how expensive academic publishing was, she may have complained slightly less about textbook prices as a student. Slightly.

Just as she was closing down her spreadsheets, her computer chimed at her yet again. This time it was just one email, and it was from Kylo Ren. 

> _ Liberal Arts staff: _
> 
> _ This email is a follow-up to last week's meeting with department and unit heads. The college has officially been assessed a $4,750,000 budget reduction. Over the last 5 years, the college has been spending and accruing debt in order to pay for its programs, research, endowments, etc., and the level of this debt is no longer manageable. We have reached the point where it is crucial for the college to make more strategic funding decisions going forward if it is going to keep providing support for these commitments. _
> 
> _ I have been working with financial analysts in the Dean's office to determine the final cuts in each unit. If you are receiving this email, your unit has been flagged for a permanent budget decrease of at least 10%. We are also implementing a partial 75% lapse from your current fiscal year funds to allow for a buffer into the next fiscal year (the balances will be taken out overnight). _
> 
> _ The Dean's office will work with its units through this very difficult process. I will provide you with more detailed information as it becomes available. If you have immediate questions, reply to this email and I will address your specific concerns. _
> 
> _ Kylo Ren, MBA _
> 
> _Executive Financial Officer_

Rey felt her stomach start to turn, the many doughnuts inside not helping matters. 

“Fuck.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Uh oh.
> 
> * * *
> 
> What's a [listserv](https://mail-list.com/what-is-a-listserv/)?
> 
> What's a [Dean](https://www.top10onlinecolleges.org/list/5-duties-of-a-college-dean/)?
> 
> What does the [admin hierarchy at a university look like](https://www.edrawsoft.com/administrative-structure-of-university.php)?
> 
> What's a [palynologist](https://www.environmentalscience.org/career/palynologist)?
> 
> What does ["emeritus"](https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/hr/guidance/visitingtitles/emeritus/index) actually mean anyway?


End file.
